EXHIBITS
Extension, Enterprise, and Education: The Legacy of Co-operatives and Cooperation in Utah: Continuing Cooperative Education
Continuing Cooperative Education
In 1977, former President of the UCA, W. B. Robins, donated the Association’s records to the Special Collections Department at USU. Simultaneously, he endowed a fund within the College of Business for a curriculum to study and teach the principles of cooperatives.
Contributors to the development of USU’s Cooperative Education curriculum included W. B. Robins and Gary Hansen. Robins contributed monetarily by endowing the College of Business to study and teach the principles of cooperatives. Economics Professor Hansen contributed not only by teaching new classes in international and worker cooperatives but also by donating materials on cooperatives to the USU Library’s Special Collections & Archives and by funding development of a Cooperatives Archives, including this digital collection.
Gary B. Hansen graduated from high school in 1953. He attended Utah State Agricultural College (now Utah State University) and graduated with a BS in economics in 1957.
Hansen receive a master’s in economics in 1963. During that summer, he authored an article on “Industry of Destiny: Copper in Utah,” based on his master’s thesis at Utah State University, which was published in the Summer 1963 issue of the Utah Historical Quarterly. He also co-authored The Richest Hole on Earth: A History of the Bingham Copper Mine with Professor Arrington, publishing this book as a research monograph by Utah State University.
During his thirty-one years at USU, Hansen served as a professor of economics, and from 1993 to 1998 as a professor of management and human resources. During the 1970s and 1980s, he conducted research and worked extensively to improve labor-management cooperation, the use of innovative approaches to collective bargaining and workplace democracy, and to promote the use of worker-owned cooperatives and other forms of worker ownership (ESOPs).[1]
Papers on International and Worker’s Cooperatives
